I’ve built startups in travel, foodtech and AI SaaS healthcare. I definitely know 0 to 1 and 1 to 10.
Hipway.ru (2010–2014) — travel flash sales, #1 in Russia in its segment. $15M gross bookings, 90 people, three offices in Russia and CIS, over $2M of venture capital.
StarChef (2018–2021) — a dark kitchen with several delivery-only restaurant brands, including “Varlamov Est”. Venture funded.
Yung Sidekick (2021–now) — AI SaaS for therapists in the US market: notes, reports, client progress. Now building a rollup of mental health clinics on top of it.
I understand how to build teams from scratch, how venture terms work, how a product is built, how to launch, how to pivot hypotheses fast and how to survive when money is short. I’ve done and managed almost every area of the business myself.
That said, with these startups I haven’t gone through a big fundraise beyond Series A or the transformation of a startup into a large corporation.